title: Risk, mobility or population size? Drivers of technological richness among contact-period western North American hunter-gatherers.
abstract: Identifying factors that influence technological evolution in small-scale societies is important for understanding human evolution. There have been a number of attempts to identify factors that influence the evolution of food-getting technology, but little work has examined the factors that affect the evolution of other technologies. Here, we focus on variation in technological richness (total number of material items and techniques) among recent hunter-gatherers from western North America and test three hypotheses: (i) technological richness is affected by environmental risk, (ii) population size is the primary determinant of technological richness, and (iii) technological richness is constrained by residential mobility. We found technological richness to be correlated with a proxy for environmental risk-mean rainfall for the driest month-in the manner predicted by the risk hypothesis. Support for the hypothesis persisted when we controlled for shared history and intergroup contact. We found no evidence that technological richness is affected by population size or residential mobility. These results have important implications for unravelling the complexities of technological evolution.
authors.affiliation: Human Evolutionary Studies Program and Department of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, , Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Collard
authors.forename: Briggs
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Buchanan
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: O'Brien
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Scholnick
mesh_terms: D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D003468:Cultural Evolution; D017753:Ecosystem; D004777:Environment; D006801:Humans; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D009656:North America; D012044:Regression Analysis; D012306:Risk; D012919:Social Behavior; D053001:Tool Use Behavior
keywords: hunter–gatherers; mobility hypothesis; population-size hypothesis; risk hypothesis; technological richness; western North America